gReep

March 30th

With the World of Warcraft patch 5.2: The Thunder King, among other things, came new creatures. One of the new world critters is the Patch is the Zandalari Battlesaur. Often one forgets what goes into creating new content. Not only programming and graphical design, but also sound design is an important part of new content material.

In a recent article, the Blizzard sound artist team shows some of the work they’ve done with the new patch. They also answer some questions in an interview.

Blizzard employee Nethaera points out that there are several layers in simultaneous relation, when designing sound for a creature in the game. These sounds are recorded, mixed and mastered individually and then put together.

In the case of the Zandalari Battlesaur, here are the individual sounds in the process.

A voice actor: We pulled in some of the best voice talent in the industry who excel in making creature sounds. In this case, we were able to bring in Jon Olson who also did the non-Voice Over sounds for sha and hozen mobs. What you hear is an edit of two takes that form a base layer of performance and sound that other layers and effects are crafted around.

Bear: Early last year, senior Sound Designer Chris Kowalski took his recording gear and his courage to Big Bear to gather some scary up-close source material from several of the wild animals at Predators in Action. The bear recordings from that visit were used to add size and embellish some of what the actor did.

Tiger: While at Predators in Action, Chris was also given the opportunity to record the tiger that was used in the movie Gladiator. This resulted in a ton of great material, including a lot of big cat chest rumbles and roars you may hear mixed into several creatures across Pandaria.

Final Sound: The final mix is comprised of all the layers above along with additional processing and mastering that make it fit within the world.

Here’s how the individual sounds for this particular creature correlate.

gReep

March 30th

Sometimes surfing the web one will be reminded of interesting events and situations, new and old. If you are a World of Warcraft player, do you remember the corrupted blood plague incident years ago? MMO Opinion remembers. So does Wikipedia, the source for this article.
Here follows an accounting of the extraordinary events that took place.

The Corrupted Blood plague incident was one of the first events to affect entire servers. Patch 1.7 saw the opening of Zul’Gurub, the game’s first 20-player raid dungeon where players faced off against a tribe of trolls under the sway of the god Hakkar the Soulflayer. Upon engaging Hakkar, players were stricken by a debuff called “Corrupted Blood” which would periodically sap their life. The disease was also passed on to other players simply by being near infected players. Originally this malady was confined within the Zul’Gurub instance but made its way into the outside world by way of hunter pets or warlock minions that contracted the disease.

Within hours Corrupted Blood had completely infected major cities because of their high player concentrations. Low-level players were killed in seconds by the high-damage disease. Eventually Blizzard fixed the issue so that the plague could not exist outside of Zul’Gurub.
The corrupted blood plague so closely resembled the outbreak of real-world epidemics that scientists are currently looking at ways MMORPGs or other massively distributed systems can model human behavior during outbreaks. The reaction of players to the plague closely resembled previously hard-to-model aspects of human behavior that may allow researchers to more accurately predict how diseases and outbreaks spread amongst a population.

The conditions and reactions of the event got the attention of epidemiologists for its implications of how human populations could react to a real-world epidemic. Anti-terrorism officials also took notice of the event noting the implications of some players to plan and perpetuate the epidemic.

World of Warcraft, at the time, had more than two million players all over the world. Before Blizzard Entertainment commented on the outbreak, there was debate whether it was intentional or a glitch. On Blizzard’s forums, posters were commenting about how it was a fantastic world event, and calling it “the day the plague wiped out Ironforge.

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